Crate by Crate: Volunteering at a Neighborhood Produce Market
Early Saturday shifts unloading New England farm shares, sorting bok choy and winter squash, and feeling rooted in a transient city.
Consulting life can quietly turn your own neighborhood into an airport hotel if you aren’t careful. For a stretch during my second year out of school, I knew Terminal B at Logan better than I knew the blocks three streets south of my apartment.
Joining a Saturday morning mobile produce market shift changed that almost overnight. Food access work is wonderfully concrete: trucks arrive from regional farms and wholesale rescues, volunteers weigh and bundle greens—from kale and apples to gai lan and daikon—and neighbors shop with dignity for whatever their household actually cooks.
Half the joy is swapping recipe ideas across languages over crates of Napa cabbage and bitter melon, learning three new ways grandmothers on my own street braise winter radish.